Charged by U.S. authorities with espionage, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden left Hong Kong on Sunday and flew to Moscow, although it was not believed Russia would be his final destination.
Snowden is expected to continue on to Cuba and then to Venezuela, the New York Times reported, citing reports by Russian’s Interfax agency. . . .
Snowden, 29, arrived Sunday in Russia aboard an Aeroflot commercial flight shortly after 9 a.m. Eastern time (5 p.m. in Moscow). . . .
New York Sen. Chuck Schumer said Sunday that Snowden’s flight would likely harm U.S.-Russian relations. It is “almost certain” Russian President Vladimir Putin knew about the fugitive’s plan to fly to Moscow, Schumer told CNN, “and it’s likely he approved it.”The Reuters news agency cited “a source at the Russian airline Aeroflot” as saying Snowden “would fly on within 24 hours to Cuba and then planned to go to Venezuela.” . . .
Federal officials Friday charged Snowden with three counts: theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information and willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person.

You can read the rest at Viral Read. I’ve become weary of arguing with friends about this story, and probably wouldn’t like it any better if I were arguing with my enemies about it. Arguing just isn’t that much fun, really, and all this surveillance stuff is boring. Anyway, we’re out of coffee at the house, and I need it because I was up late working on this story:

The problem is we don’t know what was going on the last 15 hours of Hastings’ life. He sent an e-mail to his BuzzFeed editors, saying the FBI was snooping around with his “close associates,” and the next thing we know, he slammed his car into a tree. I don’t think it’s a conspiracy or anything. Frankly, I think Hastings just got paranoid and freaked out. But the FBI has denied that it was investigating him, which raises the question: Why did Hastings believe he was being investigated, if he wasn’t? And what the hell was he doing driving 100 mph through Los Angeles at 4 o’clock on a Tuesday morning?

The man suspected of killing Jacksonville child Charish Perriwinkle, 8, has been charged with murder.
Members with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office said Saturday that 56-year-old Donald Smith, a registered sex offender who has been convicted in the past of kidnapping, acted alone in the incident.
Charish’s body was found Saturday morning. She went missing while shopping with her mother Friday night.

Don’t tell this to the #FreeKate mob, but once upon a time, Donald Smith was also 18 years old. Were there warning signs that the teenage Donald Smith might become a child-killing pervert?

We don’t know, but we do know that Kaitlyn Hunt’s supporters insist she’s an innocent lamb who — aside from her penchant for having sex with 14-year-olds in the school bathroom — is a “model citizen” who is being unjustly prosecuted for a “high school romance.” Merely comparing Saint Kate of the Blessed Finger to creepy old violent sex offenders is hateful, her devotees tell us, because there is no evidence that she has any tendency toward violence. Oh, wait . . .

On Wednesday, Aug. 17 [2011], I – along with the venerable child advocate Dr. Judith Reisman – attended a conference hosted by the pedophile group B4U-ACT. Around 50 individuals were in attendance, including a number of admitted pedophiles (or “minor-attracted persons” as they euphemistically prefer), a few self-described “gay activists” and several supportive mental-health professionals. World renowned “sexologist” Dr. Fred Berlin of Johns Hopkins University gave the keynote address, saying: “I want to completely support the goal of B4U-ACT.”
Here are some highlights from the conference:

Pedophiles are “unfairly stigmatized and demonized” by society.

There was concern about “vice-laden diagnostic criteria” and “cultural baggage of wrongfulness.”

“We are not required to interfere with or inhibit our child’s sexuality.”

“Children are not inherently unable to consent” to sex with an adult. . . .

Read the rest of that and then I dare you to claim — as the “Free Kate” crowd does — that there is no danger that letting Kaitlyn Hunt go free would establish a dangerous precedent, giving aid and encouragement to these twisted perverts who want to void all age-of-consent laws. And make no mistake, perverts who want to legalize sex with kids are enthusiastically cheering for the “Free Kate” cause.

“This is what I’ve always felt. Get rid of numerical age of consent laws. If a person was too young to be able to give meaningful consent to sexual activity, put the onus on the prosecutor to demonstrate as much. …”

(Holy crap: You must prove a 9-year-old did not consent?)

“… Get rid of arbitrary numbers. No one should have to do math to love another person.”

But it’s in real life, so it just drives you to drink or some sort of escapeism.

Dana June 23rd, 2013 @ 7:40 pm

My darling bride — of 34 years, one month and four days — is an RN in a pediatric unit, and she has said, many times, that a lot of the chronically ill children — the oncology patients, the cystic fibrosis kids — grow up really fast, because they have to. Perhaps Marty Smith would think that an eight-year-old CF kid, who had to mature pretty fast to deal with the pain and hospitalizations and all of the rest from his disease, would meet the test of being mature enough to consent to sexual relations.

So they want to get rid of arbitrary numbers and leave it up to arbitrary decisions of judges and prosecutors?

My girlfriend’s comment to this: “None of these people have ever been raped, have they?”

Cube June 23rd, 2013 @ 11:07 pm

Good grief, if you’re a US citizen you need a passport to see Niagara Falls from the Canadian side. How do you travel internationally without one? It’s like there are different laws for special people…

Cube June 23rd, 2013 @ 11:10 pm

Translation of #FreeKate and the other perverts: DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO!!!11!!!

RichFader June 23rd, 2013 @ 11:35 pm

Would you believe “Where’s Dildo?”

Shawny June 24th, 2013 @ 12:45 am

….Or where I can do it….. cause if they’re defending this in school toilet stalls today you know damned well they’ll be defending it in the salad bar at Ziggy’s tomorrow?

[…] Stacy's tired of arguing his point of view with those of us who think that it's time for a National Conversation on what information is being captured by the NSA and other intelligence agencies about so many Americans, but I'll just say that my point of view is that this administration has demonstrated many times that any information it has it will use to advance what it regards as its own best interests, no matter the constitutionality or probity, and that they will lie to anyone about anything when it suits them, and they will look for means to advance political prosecutions whenever they have the opportunity, for whatever reason strikes their fancy, and they will use public resources to do so. Surely, given previous revelations regarding the use of metadata, it's a much bigger story that the Chinese were able to steal detailed information about so many of our most advanced weapons systems, but until yesterday I didn't see the administration complaining about it, and it's certainly not been given any prominence in the MSM. I'm not a security expert, so I don't know what sort of damage these revelations might have done to our interests, but we've been lied to so many times by these boobs that I'm certainly not inclined to take their representations about how many plots they're supposed to have stopped as a result of that information at face value, and I'm not going to take their claim that they're only monitoring about 300 people at any given time out of the enormous amount of information they're collecting, or that their FISA courts are anything but a rubber stamp, or that their 'accidental' data collection doesn't amount to illegal search and seizure. I'm afraid that we have a crisis of credibility, the kind that Obama likes to refer to as falling on people who don't trust their government very much, when it abuses their trust so blatantly and perjures itself so casually when it is called on the carpet. […]